Usenet Death Penalty - History

History

The first UDP software was written by Karl Kleinpaste in 1990, though there is disagreement when the term itself was coined: the Net Abuse FAQ claims 1993, but a message posted on 18 August of that year claims that it was coined "years earlier" by Eliot Lear.

A UDP was implemented against UUNET on August 1, 1997 after it became a host for many spammers and was unresponsive to abuse complaints. It forced the provider to implement antispam policies and tools and close their open relays. Executives called the UDP "digital terrorism", threatened legal action, and asserted they had been planning to move against spammers anyway. As the volume of spam from UUNET decreased, the organizers called off the penalty on August 6, though their announcement was stifled by cancel messages from UDP opponents.

An active UDP was implemented against CompuServe on November 18, 1997, which was lifted the following day after the company implemented anti-spamming measures and instituted a new acceptable use policy addressing spamming.

A UDP scheduled to begin against Excite@Home on January 19, 2000 was lifted the day before it was scheduled to begin after the ISP began scanning for the misconfigured proxy servers on home users' computers which it blamed for spam originating from its network.

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